The title of this collection of essays is taken from a phrase on p. 210: ‘the world-ending fire of industrial fundamentalism’. This faith assumes that an economy can be based on ‘the fantastical possibility’ of limitless wants, growth, natural resources and debt, and that all people ‘are entitled to pursue without limit whatever they conceive as desirable’ (p. 211). Such hubris is the immaturity of a libertarianism that fails to acknowledge that growing up involves taking responsibility.
Wendell Berry has, since the 1960s, advocated (as a writer) and lived (as a farmer) a philosophy of agrarianism, diametrically opposed to industrialism. Paul Kingsnorth's short introduction does not place Berry in his context as a prominent figure in the American organic movement, but students of organic history will recognise in Berry's work parallels with the thoughts of such writers as H. J. Massingham and E. F. Schumacher. Like his British counterparts, Berry emphasises the God-givenness of the natural world, and the need to work with it rather than exploit and exhaust it.
In a centrally important essay, ‘Two Minds’, Berry contrasts the approaches of the Rational Mind and the Sympathetic Mind to the natural world. The former is ‘the lowest common denominator of the government-corporation-university axis’ (p. 183), promoting large-scale uniformity in agriculture via technology and expensive grants, while claiming to be purely detached and objective; it has no commitment to regional culture or physical landscape. The Sympathetic Mind has an impulse towards context and wholeness, values local topography and history, and dislikes disfigurement and estrangement.
One anticipates the inevitable objections: isn't all this nostalgic, unadventurous, unrealistic, and so forth? Berry tells us that as a young man he left his Kentucky home and spent time in New York; but rural life drew him back, and in this collection's opening essay, ‘A Native Hill’, he movingly demonstrates that attachment to a particular piece of land provides a wealth of material for a writer who observes it closely. As for lack of realism: Berry reminds us that our ability to feed ourselves depends on a few inches of topsoil that took thousands of years to form, vast areas of which have been destroyed in little more than a century. Our economic system is ‘based upon several kinds of ruin’ (p. 69) and therefore represents the opposite of the true meaning of ‘economy’ as ‘care of one's home’.
Other topics covered include an analysis of the cultural prejudice against rural people; Berry's experience of cultivating marginal land; thoughts on the concept of citizenship; health as a measure of farming; and the importance of being close to the sources of one's food.
The book lacks an index, and there is no obvious structure to the order in which the thirty-one essays are presented, but Wendell Berry's lucid and forceful case for agrarianism stands unaffected by these minor quibbles. The publishers are to be congratulated on bringing his ideas to the attention of the mainstream media; they must now do the same for some of our homegrown agrarians.
